The Book Reviews You Can Trust!

Are You Familiar With Gregory Maguire? Have you read Wicked? If you have, then you’ve read Gregory Maguire. Being a huge Wizard of Oz fan, I have of course enjoyed all of the books in the Wicked Series (Except the last one, I haven’t read that yet). Gregory Maguire has a way of taking common fairy tales that we are all familiar with, or other stories we think we know, and giving them his own unique twist; taking you on a journey you never expected.

Do you like Cinderella? You want to read “Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sister”.

How about Snow White? Then you would love “Mirror, Mirror”.

“What-the-Dickens” is a story about the tooth-fairy. It revolves around Dinah Ormsby, her older brother Zeke, their 2 year old sister Rebecca Ruth, and their just showed up on their doorstep distant cousin Gage. There isn’t a definite time frame, or year that this book seems to be set in. The back story on the family is the parents disappeared, Gage shows up. On page 5 we read that “the Ormsby’s were trying the experiment of living by gospel standards, and they hoped to be surer of their faith tomorrow than they’d been yesterday”. This is also a family who lives with no cable television, internet service, or visits to the mall.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill tooth-fairy either. He is what would be called a Skibbereen, or Skibberee. “His arm webs were filmy, nearly transparent, and his skin was suggestible, like water. I suppose his circulation worked on a capillary system; his coloring could shift from pale to dark and many shades in between” (pg. 20). He sounds kind of like a dragon fly to me.

So are you interested? Good. Because I have just started this book, and “What-the-Dickens” (yes, that is his name) seems like he has a lot of trouble coming his way. I can’t wait to share it with you!